I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for supporting autonomous discovery for enhanced WiFi devices.
II. Background
Wireless communication networks are widely deployed to provide various communication content, such as voice, video, packet data, messaging, broadcast, and the like. These wireless networks may be multiple-access networks capable of supporting multiple users by sharing the available network resources. Examples of such multiple-access networks include: Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) networks, Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) networks, Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA) networks, Orthogonal FDMA (OFDMA) networks, and Single-Carrier FDMA (SC-FDMA) networks. A wireless communication network may also be referred to as a wide area network (WAN). For example, a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE), is a WAN standard that provides high speed data access, with latency on the order of 30 ms.
In contrast to a WAN, a local area network (LAN) may be provided wirelessly (WLAN). A WLAN may offer high data speeds, and decreased latency (on the order of 10 ms). A WLAN may be used to interconnect proximate devices by employing widely used networking protocols, such as Wireless Fidelity (WiFi), or, more generally, a protocol selected from the IEEE 802.11 wireless protocol family. Proximate WiFi devices may discovery one another during a predefined time allotted for the respective discovery, by each device, of other nearby devices, herein referred to as the periodic discovery interval, or the discovery window. However, because the duration of a given periodic discovery interval is not optimized in known WiFi discovery protocols, disadvantages may arise due to inefficiencies inherent in having a predefined length for the periodic discovery interval.
It may be desirable to overcome these disadvantages, such as by increasing the power consumption efficiency of devices engaged in discovery, by adaptively optimizing the periodic discovery interval to increase efficiencies for WiFi devices engaged in autonomous discovery.